Traveling to Europe

My first trip to Europe was as an 18-year-old in 1980 on a church youth trip to England to attend the International Christian Youth Conference and tour sites related to John Wesley. I had not been back to Europe until 2010 when Keith and I went to England and France. The highlight of that trip was getting engaged in the Eiffel Tower in Paris.

That trip was followed by a trip to Spain, Italy (Venice, Verona, and Milan), and one night in Paris (flights home were better from Paris) in 2012. Then in 2014, we attended the World Science Fiction Convention in London and toured Ireland before the convention.

Keith really enjoys international travel and while it wasn’t something I had done a lot of, I enjoy it, especially with someone else doing all of the planning (Keith loves travel planning).

With my cancer and CDH1 diagnoses and double mastectomy in 2015, then evaluating next steps and finally having a total gastrectomy in 2017, our main trips during that time were to northern Michigan (where Keith is from) and Houston (where I had my surgery). We were just getting ready to consider traveling more when COVID hit. The last couple of years, we had done Hawaii, an Alaskan cruise, Canada, and Mexico, now we were ready for a European adventure. I was excited and a little nervous. I’ve handled snacks traveling in the US and North America, but how would I do on a 9-hour plane ride and in a foreign country where I don’t know the food and can’t read the labels?

We left home about 8:15 Wednesday morning for a 10:48 am flight from Kansas City to Chicago. We had a few hours to kill in O’Hare before our 4:55 pm flight to Rome. They served us supper on the plane around 6:30 and then I tried to go to sleep, but I’m horrible at sleeping on planes. About 9:30 (Chicago time), my body told me it was time to have a snack, so I had a snack in the middle of the time I should have been sleeping. They then served us breakfast about 8 am Rome time (1 am Chicago time) and we landed at 9 am. We took a taxi to our hotel, arriving about 10:30, and were pleasantly surprised our room was ready. We resisted the temptation to take a nap and went about exploring Rome after freshening up. Operating on basically no sleep, I went to bed about 9:00 and slept well.

I was still tired the next day but kept myself going, made an early night of it again, and by the third day was rested enough, pretty much shifted my schedule to my normal get up/go to bed time.

At home, I usually have a light breakfast around 9 am, lunch around noon, 2 or 3 snacks in the afternoon, supper around 6:00, and a snack in the evening around 9:00. In general terms, Europeans eat later. Although we didn’t totally adjust to their schedule, for various reasons we found ourselves often not eating lunch until 1 or 2 and eating dinner after 7, maybe as late as 8. At this point, I’m pretty good about being able to adjust my meal schedule by just adding a snack time. A few days into the trip, I found I was often needing to do a snack in the morning between breakfast and lunch, the same number of snacks as normal between lunch and supper, but then often forgoing the evening snack as by the time it was snack time, I was going to bed. It wasn’t really more snacks, just a shift in the time of them which made a difference in the type of snacks I wanted as my typical evening snack is not what I want as a morning snack.

A few of the protein bars I purchased in Europe.

My normal snacks include things like cheese, protein bars, beef jerky, nuts, or trail mix. I often bring the complete array of snacks while I’m traveling, but for a two-week trip, that seemed like a lot. I scaled back (while still overpacking snacks) and trusted that I would be able to purchase protein snacks in Italy and Greece. Cheese wasn’t a good option as we were out and about each day. Finding protein bars was pretty easy. Many of them even had labels in English. If it wasn’t in English, it was still pretty easy as the Italian word for protein is proteine. The thing to look out for is that everything is calculated per 100 grams, rather than by serving. Sometimes there is also a number by bar or serving (which may or may not be the same size as the bar), but not always. I don’t worry too much about whether it’s 7 grams or 27 grams of protein, so it wasn’t a large concern. I didn’t find very many fruit and nut trail mixes or beef jerky. The first time I saw beef jerky on the trip was in the Athens airport (after our 5-night stay in Rome). I didn’t buy any there, figuring I would have more opportunities in Greece, but never saw any again. So when we returned to Italy a week later, I made a point of seeking out the beef jerky in the Athens airport. It wasn’t a must have, but I just enjoy some variety to my snacks. I had an assortment of protein bars on the trip. I’m returning home with more than I came with as buying different ones became a thing. Some I like better than others, but I haven’t found any yet that I refused to eat. There’s a few I really enjoyed and wished I could find in the US. They were often over 3 Euros at the roadside stands, but mostly 1-2 in the markets.

I’ve shared before that my go-to drink is unsweet iced tea. That’s a problem in Europe since as much as they enjoy their hot tea, they don’t do cold tea and they don’t do ice. I did find readily available bottles of “ice tea” but they were lemon and peach flavored and were sweetened. Many of them were “zero sugar” but that still meant they were sweetened, which I don’t enjoy the taste of. It’s simple to make iced tea by making hot tea and pouring it over ice (and usually adding additional water) but that requires having ice. The hotel in Rome had a very small ice machine. Every time I asked for ice, they didn’t have any and it took about 20 minutes. I think they only made it on demand, so I mostly got by without. I had no problem getting ice at the two hotels we stayed at in Greece. I still had to ask for it, but both hotels had a bar, which had ice, and they were both generous in giving me a bucket of ice (although much smaller than those you would find in the US). I never felt it was an imposition. So, while in Greece, I often made hot tea in the room, pouring it over a cup full of ice to make iced tea, which I immensely enjoyed. I brought a YETI cup and an empty tea bottle with me, so a few days I even made it the night before, poured into the bottle and put in the refrigerator, and then got ice in my cup the next day to carry it with me. Back in Italy, we were at a small hotel/guest house again, so I didn’t even bother asking if they had ice. In restaurants, if the still water was served cold, I made myself drink it without ice to somewhat accept the culture. If it wasn’t cold, I would usually ask for ice. The amounts served in restaurants varied quite a bit, but I was usually able to get some.

I did pretty well with most meals and didn’t feel like I was wasting too much food. Sometimes I chose to just get an appetizer or we shared plates, but usually I got my own entrée, mostly pasta, chicken, or fish.

Menu for the 10-course meal.
 On this day, the Guineafowl was
replaced with Pigeon.

One night in Athens we ate at a Michelin-starred restaurant. It was a fixed menu with only two choices: a 10-course meal or a 13-course meal. We went with the smaller. We also decided to do the wine pairing, which I may have been even more nervous about than the 10 courses. When the server asked if there were any allergies or dietary concerns, I did mention that I couldn’t eat a lot, so don’t be offended if I leave food behind. With 10 courses, each course was quite small. I ate all of every course, most of which were only 2 or 3 bites, until we got to the pasta and meat courses (courses 6 and 7) and left some of each of those behind. After a palate cleanser, I ate most of the dessert, but had little room left to do more than taste the “Kerasmata”, the additional treat. The wine was offered in small amounts and I was able to drink most of it also. All in all, I consider the 10-course meal a success!

Our flight from Rome to Chicago departed at 10 am on Thursday (two weeks after we arrived). We got an email from the airline the day before stating that due to the new Entry/Exit System launched the day after we arrived for non-EU nationals, they were encouraging customers to arrive 3.5 hours prior to departure. With a 45-minute taxi ride to the airport, that meant getting up early to depart the hotel at 5:45 am. Tuesday night, I had been extremely tired and went to bed about 8:30 and slept nearly 12 hours. The rest did me good as getting up early on Thursday wasn’t as difficult as it would have otherwise been. With the airport not very busy at 6:30 am, we breezed through everything in less than an hour and had plenty of time to eat breakfast in the airport.

Originally scheduled as a 10.5-hour flight, they had reduced the time by 20 minutes. Then we got in nearly 20 minutes earlier than that. Both reductions in time were appreciated, as our original schedule had us with only about 2 hours and 10 minutes to go through immigration, customs, recheck baggage, transfer terminals, and reenter security. We used most all of the extra time as we arrived at the gate about 40 minutes before our boarding time for Kansas City. Success!

I had purchased 3 bags of beef jerky in the Athens airport. They were small bags and ended up being a little less than a normal sized snack, but they were still fine as something different. Being so near the end of the trip, I only ate one during the rest of the time in Italy and then ate one on the plane from Rome to Chicago. That left me one in what I was bringing into the US and I didn’t realize it was prohibited as a meat, so ended up surrendering it in Chicago. That snafu may have added a little to our transition time in Chicago, but fortunately not much.

Eating during our 22-hour day was a little challenging, but I just kept eating snacks every couple of hours. They fed us a hot lunch on the plane and then a beef handheld pie type thing about supper time (based on time in Rome). There were also pretzels in the morning and ice cream mid-afternoon, but I had plenty of snacks with me to supplement. I started with just drinking water, but then decided to ask for two cups of ice and a hot tea to make my own iced tea in my YETI cup on the plane.

We got into Kansas City at 5:30 pm (12:30 am Friday Rome time). I could have gotten by with just more snacks, but my husband wanted dinner, so we stopped at one of our favorite Kansas City BBQ restaurants on the way home from the airport. After relaxing for a little while at home, I went to bed about 8:30 pm. A long day! A great trip!

I’ll share more itinerary and pictures from the trip in a second blog post.